Adam Levine began Sunday’s Super Bowl Halftime Show wearing a long black coat over a black track jacket and black pants. The ensemble was missing one thing: A black hat.

Ever since the NFL announced Maroon 5 as this year’s Halftime Show headliners, the backlash has been varied and also completely, deservedly unrelenting. The thick of it was political: The ostensibly progressive band assumed the mantle after other pop stars, including Rihanna and Jay-Z, had rejected the offer in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick. But the backlash was also regional. In a year when the Super Bowl was held in Atlanta, the choice of a Los Angeles pop band was a missed opportunity; the show could’ve looked like the Super Bowl Music Fest instead. And then, of course, there was the simplest and most fundamental critique: Maroon 5 is boring.

Levine’s performance gave the impression that he had internalized the villain role and aimed to lean into it. His eyes were fixed in a permanent smolder. He stripped until he was shirtless. And he even smacked a few riffs on a red electric guitar. Throughout, he was accented by bright red fireworks above him and shrieking girls in the crowd below him. Adam Levine will be 40 next month, but he clearly continues to fancy himself a bad boy.

If that notion wasn’t laughable before—he’s a panelist on The Voice—it became so a few minutes into the show when the broadcast was interrupted by... Spongebob. Following November’s death of the show’s creator, Stephen Hillenburg, this year’s acts finally gave in to fans’ long-simmering desires for the Super Bowl halftime to nod to Spongebob’s Super Bowl-esque Bubble Bowl. The famous “Sweet Victory” clip was worked in quite cleverly, doubling as a disorienting transition and a neat visual sample. Squidward’s introduction, “And now, a true musical genius who needs no introduction,” was used to set the stage for Travis Scott, who seemingly burst out of the show’s cartoon world and arrived onstage via a flaming asteroid. In the short time that the stage was his, Scott bounced around lithely, fires burning all around him, and rapped parts of “Sicko Mode.” While these weren’t the only recently released songs to be performed (Maroon 5’s set included the bland “Girls Like You” and the "ah yes, that song" in their catalogue, “Moves Like Jagger”) on Sunday night, they felt like the only contemporary ones.

This year’s Super Bowl was notable in that it featured the same two teams, the Rams and the Patriots, as the 2002 Super Bowl. And with the exception of Travis Scott, much of the halftime show felt like a tribute to that era, if not that very year. Maroon 5 leaned heavily on hits off their debut album, 2002’s Songs About Jane, playing “Harder to Breathe,” “This Love,” and “She Will Be Loved.” When they did play their most recent single, “Girls Like You,” Cardi B, who sat the show out in protest, was replaced by a gospel choir—turning the song’s most current component fully retro. And Big Boi made a brief cameo, rolling up in a Cadillac, to perform OutKast’s 2003 single, “The Way You Move.”

Every halftime show gives way to bits of nostalgia—half the years feature legacy acts—but Maroon 5’s emphasis on their early work spoke to the band’s aspirations for the show. While Maroon 5 was never Led Zeppelin, their early songs are the closest they’ve come to playing rock and roll. And throughout Sunday night’s performance, Adam Levine struck the posture of a rock star. Every move he made oozed PG-13 sex appeal and, at one point, he actually asked the audience, “Can I play guitar for you right now?” (Answer: Cut to dudes shredding.)

Levine taking off his clothes to reveal a very chiseled and tattooed chest might’ve been transgressive in 1959—and maybe even in 2002—but at this point sex and rock and roll not only feels dated, it feels hollow (especially considering the NFL's thundering crackdown on former Halftime Show performer Janet Jackson for her own reveal). The most rock and roll thing Maroon 5 could have done would have been to stick it to the man—Levine could’ve taken a knee in the middle of their set, or stripped down to a Colin Kaepernick t-shirt. Instead, the closest the band came to a statement was allowing lanterns to float behind them that formed the words “One Love” as they played “She Will Be Loved.” (...what?) Throughout the show, the band seemed more comfortable existing in a simpler political moment—playing old hits and inhabiting old values. It wasn’t quite a boring performance, but it certainly wasn’t interesting.